I spent a good part of the day today making some changes to Vagablog in an attempt to make it more usable. The primary change is the addition of the markup menu to allow for easily inserting markup into the document. There are menu items that allow for inserting the begining or ending tags for underline, bold, emphasis, and italic. If you have text selected when you activate one of the items it will insert both begin and end tags around the selected text. This just seemed like the correct behavior, hopefully the users agree. There’s also an option to insert a link, which also can be used to surround a selection with markup. The link menu item pops up a form for filling in link details.

There are also a bunch of changes to try to make navigating within and between the forms quicker. Handling for the next and previous field shortcuts has been added. Most keyboard based devices have some dedicated combination for generating those events (on my Clie it happens to be Ctrl-p and Ctrl-o, I’m not sure what it is on other devices). I’ve also added menu bars to the popup forms. This is also so that shortcut access works. Now you should be able to do almost anything without having to take out your stylus. And if you don’t use a keyboard you still have some new shortcut options available.

This post is actually being prepared with version 1.8. So if you see this text it probably means that the new version is being uploaded to the usual place if it hasn’t appeared there already.